Latest Rationalization: Race Doesn't Exist, But Subraces Do

It's tough being a human scientist trying to not get cancelled for knowing that races do exist, so be kind.

Most every field of study, whether scientific or humanistic, witnesses disputes between lumpers and splitters, a distinction that traces back to a letter written by Charles Darwin in 1857: “

Those​ who make many species are the ‘splitters’ and those who make few are the “lumpers.”

Who is right, lumpers or splitters?

I dunno.

In general, both tendencies can be useful under different circumstances.

For example, are you against building hydroelectric dams?

Then, splitting out the small snail darter fish as a separate species protected by the Endangered Species Act, as a natural history professor and opponent of the construction of the Tellico Dam did in the 1970s, is good.

On the other hand, a Yale lumper academic recently disputed that distinction.

One of the more subtly amusing intellectual trends in the current era is human scientists, such as geneticists and forensic anthropologists, who are of the splitter tendency regarding racial categories are lately exploiting the lowbrow Race Does Not Exist conventional wisdom to denounce as racists their colleagues of the lumper tendency who find the federal Office of Management & Budget’s lumpy categories (e.g., black, white, Asian, American Indian, etc.) to be good enough for government work.

Hakan Rotmwrt

It’s pretty strange to see splitter race scientists going all Hakan Rotmwrt on the race deniers by agreeing and amplifying: Right, just as you say, continental scale races like “Asians” are unscientific, therefore we need instead to officially break out precise populations like “Japanese” and “Hmong!”

But it’s weirder to see race deniers agreeing: Uh, yeah, Asians aren’t a Thing, but Hmongs are a Thing. The Science has spoken!

Splitting has its advantages … but it also shows how confused everybody is over race and how easy it is to fool true believers in the conventional wisdom.

For example, from Science in 2021:

Forensic anthropologists can try to identify a person’s race from a skull. Should they?

Debate over “ancestry estimation” has exploded in forensic anthropology

18 Oct 2021 3:35 PM ET By Lizzie Wade

As they work to identify human remains, some forensic anthropologists are wondering whether they should continue to use racial categories.

When an unidentified body arrives in the laboratory of Allysha Winburn, a forensic anthropologist at the University of West Florida, it’s her job to study the bones to help figure out who the person was when they were alive—to give the biological remains a social identity. “We have this vast population of possible missing persons the [remains] could match, and we need to narrow down that universe,” she says.

Forensic anthropology, a branch of physical or biological anthropology, helps humanity by identifying dead bodies and assisting in bringing murderers to justice. It was fashionable earlier in this century with all those CSI shows.

In the long run, scientists who measure bones and skulls to get preliminary estimates of which missing persons to rule out by being the wrong height, age, sex, and race (reducing the number of possible matches is is a huge help to detectives), might eventually be displaced by geneticists trained in the advanced techniques of ancient DNA researchers like Nobelist Svante Paabo and David Reich.

But, contamination by outside DNA is a huge concern, and it’s more likely in crime investigation than in digging up ancient graveyards.

Say that construction workers accidentally start digging in what turns out to be an ancient cemetery. They dig up one skeleton and get their DNA all over it trying to figure out whether it was an animal or a human before deciding the latter and dutifully calling the authorities.

If it turns out that it’s just the first of 100 skeletons in this Bronze Age graveyard or whatever, well, 99% of the bodies are still buried and uncontaminated. Grad students can then carefully dig the rest up using all the latest expensive anti-contamination techniques.

But if it’s a lone murder victim, then 100% of the bodies of interest have already been contaminated with outside DNA.

So, bone and skull measuring is likely to remain a major tool in crime scene investigations.

She measures the length of the limb bones to estimate height and examines the bones’ development to estimate age at death. She studies the shape of the pelvis for clues to the person’s likely sex. And, until recently, Winburn measured features of the skull, such as its overall length and the width of the nasal opening, to do what forensic anthropologists call ancestry estimation. By statistically comparing the measurements with those from skulls with known identities, she could predict the continental ancestry—and the commonly used racial categories that may correspond to it—that a person likely identified as when alive. In other words, she could predict whether they identified as Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American.

Unfortunately, forensic anthropology’s main tool has always been the calipers, currently the world’s most uncool scientific instrument. As everybody just knows these days, calipers are tools of racist pseudoscience. Skulls can’t possibly differ statistically by race. After all, The Science has spoken.

Not surprisingly, forensic anthropology scientists have been scared for their jobs during the Racial Reckoning.

But Winburn, who is white, is now questioning whether she should continue to do so. And she’s not the only one: Over the past year, debate about ancestry estimation has exploded in U.S. forensic anthropology, with a flurry of papers examining its accuracy, interrogating its methods, and questioning its assumptions. A committee of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences’s standards board is now hammering out a new standard that would, if adopted, direct professionals away from racial categories and toward more specific social and biological populations, such as Japanese or Hmong instead of Asian.

Okaaaaay …

To you and me, obviously, when a crime scene investigator reports that a skeleton is Asian, he’s more likely to be right than when he reports that it is Japanese. But to a remarkable number of fairly influential people, that isn’t second nature to think like that at all.

They have a very different assumption about what “scientific” means, which I will get to after the paywall.

Paywall here.